In addition to the availability of all product titles in French and German, VUE and PlantFactory 2016 R3 are packed with new features and advancements that demonstrate our commitment to optimizing your user experience, strengthening our current technologies, and improving overall performance on a quarterly basis.

Philippe Gaulier (Senior Art Director) and Olivier Pron (Supervising Art Director) will connect at the Gnomon Stage on Saturday, May 27th, to share their experiences, methods, and techniques for creating concept art and visuals for films. From initial brainstorm to final concept, Philippe and Olivier will discuss the various challenges they face during the pre-production process in a film production environment, and highlight some of their contributions to films such as Dr. Strange, Mad Max: Fury Road, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Avengers: Age of Ultron. Meet the leading artists from one of Los Angeles' top studios and hear firsthand how their artistic journeys and creative processes have helped them generate conceptual art that has brought directors' visions to life for the big screen.

RSVP to attend for free. Seating is on a first-come-first-served basis, so be sure to arrive in good time to secure your place in line. Alternatively, follow along on Livestream* and ask questions during the live event using #gnomon on Twitter.

*This event will be streamed live, but due to the Marvel content that will be shared, the event will not be archived. Be sure to tune in live to watch this event on May 27th at 1:00 PM PDT. The recording will not be available for viewing after the event ends.

The 2016 R2 PLEs are fully functional version of VUE xStream/Infinite 2016 and PlantFactory Producer 2016. With the PLE, you can create complete projects, render in FullHD and save your work (see website for other limitations).

Stylized Meshing Mode: The new Stylized Meshing mode enables you to quickly and automatically generate a low polygon envelope version of vegetation models and export models with a small polygon footprint while retaining the actual vegetation visual volume. Additionally, envelope resolution, smoothing, and convexity quality is user configurable and can range from none to ultra-sharp edged meshes to ultra-smooth. Stylized Meshing mode can also be used creatively to produce non-photorealistic vegetation.

3-Axis Billboard Leaves Rotation: Using Billboard leaves is ideal when working for Real-Time engines, or, in an offline workflow, to create low polygon plants to be seen from a distance. (Billboard leaves are perfect for VUE EcoSystem populations for instance). Quick and easy to set up, this new feature is perfect to avoid any obvious linear visual pattern, by letting you add slight randomization to leaves axis rotation.

These new releases reflect our commitment to bring new features and functionality to VUE and PlantFactory as frequently as possible. We plan to release incremental updates that introduce new functionality every 4 months.

Key new features in VUE 2016 R2 include:

360° VR Panoramas: VUE 2016 R2 enables the rendering of 360° panoramas as static images or animations, which are compatible with all of VUE's render options, such as multi-pass or high dynamic range (HDR). When rendering a VR panorama, VUE automatically levels the camera perfectly to avoid unwanted distortion. Rendered VR panoramas are automatically recognized by Facebook, YouTube, and other panoramic compliant platforms as 360° images or videos.

Up to 16 Viewports:(1) VUE 2016 R2 enables you to set up to 16 viewports instead of the four traditional views.
This feature is particularly useful on a multi-monitor system, to test various framing options or when adding more camera angles without touching any of the main scene setup.
All additional viewports retain the same traditional options, such as render in view and the ability to set up as many perspective cameras as users would like.

Thank you for your comments and feedback on VUE and PlantFactory 2016. With this new release, we are adding significant functionality such as an exciting Hybrid GPU/CPU Interactive Path Tracer, the new and powerful Heightfield Terrain technology, plenty of EcoSystem technology improvements, and a lot more!

Key new features in VUE 2016 include:

Hybrid GPU/CPU Interactive Path Tracer enabling GPU rendering

Heightfield Terrains: New Terrain Modeling technology, more flexible and a lot more Powerful!

Multiple Global EcoSystem Layers, that can be saved as EcoPainter Brushes

PlantFactory Variations: Easily and quickly add more realism to your scenes and improve productivity at the same time!

PlantFactory is an innovative 3D vegetation modeling, animation, and rendering software developed for the CG, SFX, architecture and gaming communities.

"PlantFactory is a must have for any vfx pipeline -- not only as an ideal companion to VUE, but also as a strong ally in any general environment production scenario." said Peter Baustaedter, VFX art director and environment artist.

VUE 2016 is packed with new features and advancements that accelerate modeling and animation, enabling computer graphics, artists, and others to seamlessly enrich their natural environment and standout visuals for their movies, games, and architectural landscape.

Olivier Pron, supervising art director and head of art department, Method Studios, said, "VUE and PlantFactory are helping us be more creative and productive across the entire workflow for our productions, regardless the tools we currently use."

Key new features in VUE 2016 include:

Integration: Export almost any assets, including full scenes and EcoSystem populations(1)

With VUE 2016, we're introducing a brand new terrain modeling technology, more flexible and a lot more powerful, called "Heightfield Terrains".

This new technology allows you to add terrain effects that were previously impossible to achieve, such as Hydrological & Thermal Simulations!

Similar to procedural terrains, Heightfield Terrains are based on a function graph, but baked on a fixed-resolution grid. This will give you more flexibility and add more realism to your terrains. Heightfield Terrains are also significantly faster to render!

Heighfield terrains are manually sculptable and parameters can be animated - e.g. to simulate a terrain erosion over time for instance!

And finally, you can easily set up your graph outputs to drive your material presence, directly from within the Terrain Editor interface.

The Heightfield Terrains technology comes with its set of new dedicated nodes and presets, like Erosion, Slope, Convexity, Blur or Terrace.

New Layout Nodes also let you design a terrain's "layout" (most prominent features) using hand-drawn elements like Splines, elements from the scene, or simple shapes (circles, rectangles, rounded rectangles).

Start as simple as drawing a line,let the power of the Terrain Editor do the rest!

GPU rendering comes to VUE with the new Path Tracer renderer. This renderer naturally and automatically simulates real-life lighting, and automatically calculates many effects that have to be specifically set with other methods, such as soft shadows, depth of field, caustics, ambient occlusion, and indirect lighting.

Path tracing in VUE 2016 is available as an interactive rendering quality in the viewports, as well as an offline rendering engine.

"He would be far away in the jungle; tasting, touching, seeing, and feeling new things." - Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book

Spring has emerged and in the spirit of the Jungle Book Cornucopia3D is offering a new contest for the best Jungle Rendering of all time!

We want to see an explosion of vegetation, green mountains, clear skies, or maybe cloudy skies, a wild animal or two peeking from behind a tree or up in the branches.

A man or a woman might be lost in there. Any wolves?

In 1894 Kipling wrote a collection of stories that were published in magazines with wild illustrations that were actually created by Kipling's father.

Many have read the jungle book and seen the black and white Hollywood classic, possibly more people are familiar with the many feature films, animations, experimental pieces, and cartoons that were based on the Jungle Book plot and now, with the explosion of 3D, Disney is releasing a new version for 2016.

And it's your turn, create an image that lures you into the Jungle and win great prizes from Cornucopia3D and e-on software.

Thousands of Dollars Worth of Prizes!

With prizes from Cornucopia3D and e-on software the 3 winners will receive several thousands of dollars worth of prizes altogether.

Star Wars Fan Arts Winner

First Runner Up

Paul commented: Good integration of model with landscape. Good snow material. Good Star Destroyer damage. Would have been nice to see more exposed rock so that the landscape is not so uniformly one color/texture.

"A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away..."
The story begins with a light saber that is lying on the desert planet of Jakku just waiting for a mysterious someone to retrieve it.
War is still raging in the Galaxy with Star Destroyers and The Millennium Falcon.
It has been 30 years since the Rebel Alliance's victory and some of our old characters are back along with some new ones ready to fight the empire.

"It's true... All of it... The Dark Side, the Jedis... They're real!"

This contest is for all the Star Wars fans out there that want to use their 3D skills and create an image reflecting the wonders of this epic masterpiece.

Judging performed by Industry Legend!

For the first time this contest will be judged by an industry legend rather than the C3D/e-on admins.